I'm the Martin Luther King, Jr. of people with disabilities, or at least I'd better be.
Dr. Rev. King had a dream:
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3
That dream, however, has clearly not come true for the disabled. We are, for a lack of a better term, today's "Negros" (Remember how Senator Harry Reid even defined then-Senator Obama as a "light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect"?). Just like African Americans were solely defined by their skin color and ethnicity, those of us who have disabilities are defined by our disabilities—and whether we're Jews or gentiles, Blacks or Non Blacks (heck, even Black Jews), or anything else does not matter.
We're the "cripples". The "retards". The "gimps". It's even embedded in our political language. Ask
Scumbag Steve or the Far Right who hates "lib
tards". Ask the despicable tweeter who told me to "Pls stfu" when I confronted her on calling Democrats "handicapped Democraps". Ask Wendy Russell Davis and her supporters who made fun of Attorney General Greg Abbott. Ask the rapper who said that John McCain doesn't belong in a chair "unless he's paralyzed". Ask the "Crips", who would like to cripple people and are obviously making fun of people whose bodies are already crippled.
Ask even Geraldo Rivera, who (as I understand) called Greg Abbott "handicappable". Ask even the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who passed the Americans With Disabilities Act to score votes from the disabled community—which is pretty obvious, given that he never brought his sister Rose home from the institution in which she was squared away; and
she died being institutionalized instead of being on one of the Kennedy compounds and surrounded by family and friends (and Rose's being in a hospital in the state in which she was institutionalized and surrounded by only four family members, when she could have been at home and cared for by people who knew and loved her, does not count. Senator Kennedy was rich and resourced enough to bring her home where she knew and loved people, and could be familiar with her surroundings—and he knew it as well as I know it).
I could give more examples—for instance, how when people hobble, limp around, or fall is apparently funny (since, after all, that kind of situation is often used as "slapstick comedy" or "situational humor"). You get the point by now, though.
Since some clearly want to define me by my disability, you may get what you wanted—and whatever happens is on your hands as well as mine.
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